1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system.
2. Description of Related Art
Lately, there is an image forming system with a tandem configuration in which a plurality of image forming apparatuses are linked in a series by connecting a paper conveying path. Such image forming system includes, for example, two image forming apparatuses and a controller which controls the two image forming apparatuses based on data received from an external device. In such image forming system, image forming of each page is divided among the plurality of image forming apparatuses, for example one image forming apparatus forms images of pages with even page numbers and the other image forming apparatus forms images of pages with odd page numbers. However, in such image forming system with a tandem configuration, a plurality of image forming apparatuses are controlled by one controller, and the burden on the controller is large which makes the data transfer time to each image forming apparatus long.
There is a printer system which is disclosed in view of the above (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2009-66937). In the printer system, each printer with the tandem configuration includes a controller. When one controller receives print data transmitted from a host apparatus, the controller simultaneously transmits the print data to the other controller. Then, each controller processes the print data.
However, according to the above technique, transmitting and receiving data and performing processing such as print setting in each controller provided in a plurality of image forming apparatuses means similar processing is performed in each controller, which is not efficient and consumes high cost.
Therefore, it is preferable that a predetermined controller provided in an image forming apparatus receives data regarding image forming and the data is transmitted to other image forming apparatuses. However, when printing is performed with data already received once, for example, when data printed once is printed again, when actual printing is performed after test printing received data, when printing is performed after print setting is performed on the received data, etc., there is a problem that if data is transferred among the image forming apparatuses when printing starts, the timing of starting printing of each image forming apparatus is delayed by the transfer time of data among the image forming apparatuses.